Netronome uses its network flow processor for OpenFlow

Part 2: Hardware for SDN

Netronome has demonstrated its flow processor chip implementing the OpenFlow protocol, an open standard implementation of software-defined networking (SDN).

"What OpenFlow does is let you control the hardware that is handling the traffic in the network. The value to the end customer is what they can do with that"

David Wells, Netronome

The reference design demonstration, which took place at an Open Networking User Group meeting, used the fabless semiconductor player's NFP-3240 network flow processor. The NFP-3240 was running the latest 1.3.0 version of the OpenFlow protocol.

Last year Netronome announced its next-generation flow processor family, the NFP-6xxx. The OpenFlow demonstration hints at what the newest flow processor will enable once first samples become available at the year end.  

Netronome believes its flow processor architecture is well placed to tackle emerging intelligent networking applications such as SDN due to its emphasis on packet flows.

“In security, mobile and other spaces, increasingly there needs to be equipment in the network that is looking at content of packets and states of a flow - where you are looking at content across multiple packets - to figure out what is going on,” says David Wells, co-founder of Netronome and vice president of technology. “That is what we term flow processing."

This requires equipment able to process all the traffic on network links at 10 and 40 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps), and with next-generation equipment at 100Gbps. "This is where you do more than look at the packet header and make a switching decision," says Wells. 

Software-defined networking

Operators and content service providers are interested in SDN due to its promise to deliver greater efficiencies and control in how they use their switches and routers in the data centre and network. With SDN, operators can add their own intelligence to tailor how traffic is routed in their networks. 

In the data centre, a provider may be managing a huge number of servers running virtualised applications. "The management of the servers and applications is clever enough to optimise where it moves virtual machines and where it puts particular applications," says Wells. "You want to be able to optimise how the traffic flows through the network to get to those servers in the same way you are optimising the rest of the infrastructure."

Without OpenFlow, operators depend on routing protocols that come with existing switches and routers. "It works but it won't necessarily take the most efficient route through the network," says Wells.

OpenFlow lets operators orchestrate from the highest level of the infrastructure where applications reside, map the flows that go to them, determine their encapsulation and the capacity they have. "The service can be put in a tunnel, for example, and have resource allocated to it so that you know it is not going to be contended with," says Wells, guaranteeing services to customers.

"What OpenFlow does is let you control the hardware that is handling the traffic in the network," says Wells. "The value to the end customer is what they can do with that, in conjunction with other things they are doing."  

Operators are also interested in using OpenFlow in the wide area network. "The attraction of OpenFlow is in the core and the edge [of the network] but it is the edge that is the starting point," says Wells.

OpenFlow demonstration

Netronome's OpenFlow demonstration used an NFP-3240 on a PCI Express (PCIe) card to run OpenFlow while other Netronome software runs on the host server in which the card resides. 

The NFP-3240 classifies the traffic and implements the actions to be taken on the flows. The software on the host exposes the OpenFlow application programming interface (API) enabling the OpenFlow controller, the equipment that oversees how traffic is handled, to address the NFP device and influence how flows are processed.

Early OpenFlow implementations are based on Ethernet switch chips that interface to a CPU that provides the OpenFlow API. However, the Ethernet chips support the OpenFlow 1.1.0 specification and have limited-sized look-up tables with 98, 64k or 100k entries, says Wells.

The OpenFlow controller can write to the table and dictate how traffic is handled, but its size is limited. "That is a starting point and is useful," says Wells. "But to really do SDN, you need hardware platforms that can handle many more flows than these switches."

This is where the NFP processor is being targeted: it is programmable with capabilities driven by software rather than the hardware architecture, says Wells. 

NFP-6xxx architecture

The NFP-6xxx is Netronome's latest network flow processor (NFP) family, rated at 40 to 200Gbps. No particular devices have yet been detailed but the highest-end NFP-6xxx device will comprise 216 processors: 120 flow processors (see chart - Netronome's sixth generation device) and new to its NFP devices, 96 packet processors.

The architecture is made up of 'islands', units that comprise a dozen flow processors. Netronome will combine different numbers of islands to create the various NFP-6xxx devices.    

The input-output bandwidth of the device is 800Gbps while the on-chip memory totals 30 Megabyte. The device also interfaces directly to QSFP, SFP+ and CFP optical transceivers.

The 120 flow processors tackle the more complex, higher-layer tasks. Netronome has added packet processors to the NFP-6xxx to free the flow processors from tasks such as taking packets from the input stream and passing them on to where they are processed. The packet processors are programmable and perform such tasks as header classification before being processed by the flow processors.

The NFP-6xxx devices will include some 100 hardware accelerator engines for tasks such as traffic management, encryption and deep packet inspection. 

The device will be implemented using Intel's latest 22nm 3D Tri-Gate CMOS process and is designed to work with high-end general purpose CPUs such as Intel's x86 devices, Broadcom's XLP and Freescale's PowerPC.

Markets

The data centre, where SDN is already being used, is one promising market for the device as customers look to enhance their existing capabilities.

There are requirements for intelligent gateways now but this is a market that is a year or two out, says Wells. Use of OpenFlow to control large IP core routers or core optical switches is a longer term application. "Those areas will come but it will be further out," says Wells.

For other markets such as security, there is a need for knowledge about the state of flows. This is more sophisticated treatment of packets than the simple looking up the action required based on a packet's header. Netronome believes that OpenFlow will develop to not only forward or terminate traffic at a certain destination but will also send traffic to a service before it is returned.

"You could insert a service in a OpenFlow environment and what it would do is guide packets to that service and return it but inside that service you may do something that is stateful," says Wells.  This is just the sort of task security performs on flows. For example, an intrusion prevention system as a service or a firewall function.  This function could be run on a dedicated platform or as a virtual application running on Netronome's flow processor.

Further reading:

Part 1: The role of software defined networking for telcos

EZchip expands the role of the network processor, click here

MPR: Netronome goes with the flow